Tag Archives: wind power

With Obama talking the talk on climate action in his State of the Union address yesterday, now seems a good time to start compiling a planned set of blog entries about renewable energy. Many many others have done so online already (as evidenced by the fact I’m linking to them!) but I’d like to communicate my cautiously nascent optimism in my own words.

That moment won’t come a moment too soon, either, given the calamities that we’ve “locked in” for our children — the last time CO2 levels were this high (about 396 ppm in Jan 2013), sea levels were 25 metres higher than they are today. The only reason sea levels remain near pre-industrial levels is that the earth’s systems haven’t had time to equilibrate, yet. To use a baseball analogy, we’re still in the first inning of seeing the effects of our emissions.

Now, when I talk about renewables, I mainly mean wind and solar, which tower over their cleantech cousins like redwoods over a meadow. (While hydroelectric is renewable and dwarfs these two for now, it doesn’t get the sexy “cleantech” label, being a mature technology.)

But before explaining my new-found confidence — certainty, even — in “Our Renewable Future”, I wanted to address a few major myths, objections and misconceptions about renewable energy — the blogging equivalent of clearing the underbrush, I suppose. :)

I’ll do so using a Q & A format based on the way John Cook at Skeptical Science addresses common myths about climate change.